any tips for less laggy experience before I uninstall?

[teratravp]

Well, I d/l the trial last night. The performance is too lousy to play, huge harddrive thrashing, stutter every 5 secs, slideshow battles, etc...

I experimented with all the games graphics and sound options. little to no improvement at all between settings. I can be running this thing barebones in terms of features and something is still causing that hardly playable stutter to sneak in very frequently. no differences between control panel settings for my graphics, turning AA, AF that sort of thing on and off... no difference. the only thing that helped at all so far was that guy's at PS official tech forums reg edit. This gives me silky frames now, but only when it's not stuttering, which it is with extreme frequency still.

I'm curious mainly if any of you have known solutions for lag type issues that shouldnt be happening... I've been out of this game for a long time and haven't been following. my system is fine, 9500 pro o/c, athlon xp 2000, 512 ram... not uber mind you but more then sufficient to run this game... I'm on a clean install on win xp pro, no spyware, and every other game runs fantastic... plus like I said I can turn the settings low as hell here and the problem is identical... any ideas? cable internet and a router btw

[GreyFox]

Do a Disk defrag. And do it weekly.

Go into your Video Card settings and set everything to Low Graphics/Best performance.

Turn off all programs you can.

Before you log into the game, hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete (if in WinXP/2000) to get the Taskmanager, and turn of any unnecessary processes. Including Explorer. (You can bring back explorer by starting the Taskmanager again and do a File->New Task(run...) and writing Explorer in the editbox and run it).

This will give you some more RAM to play with.

Also, change your Virtual Memory to a fixed size at about 2-3 Gb. To do this, go to My Computer, Right Click the icon and choose Properties. Go to Advance, and press the Settings button in the Performance part. Click the Advance tab there and click the "Change" button there. Choose a harddrive that the game isn't installed on if you can, and set the initial size to 2048 Mb or something, and set the MAX size to the exact same amount as the initial size! (better performance that way).


In the game. Set everything to the lowest setting. Remove all Damage decals and all that, and the skydome etc too. And go into advanced Video Settings every time you start the game and click the Cull Animation Radio button (this will reset every time you restart the game, so be sure to reset it manually each time you log on).

And if you are in a big outfit, NEVER check the Outfit pane, this causes alot of FPS stutter on lowerend computers.

If you can, try to get 1Gb of Ram, will help you out alot I think.

Download the latest drivers to your Video Card. Change the Video Memory to the correct amount in the options, if it isn't already.

Well... hope this helps

[teratravp]

good ideas. no effect. well the extra virtual mem makes it so my wallpaper doesn't take awhile to come back anymore when I exit PS. hehe. and also less hd thrashing by a little but whatever is causing the stutter/freeze up like lag is still there.

I even went down to 800x600, optimal performance in control panel for gfx, all low in game... no dice. in fact the graphics performance is still as good that low as it is with everything high so its not graphics performance... its something else. I thinking just really, really poor memory management in PS itself. that's why more hard memory probably helps so many people. the game pause/stutters at the exact same places all the time, turning the corner coming up from the basement of tower, turning most corners, a couple baddies attacking... seems to be worse when attacks are going on come to think of it... not so much in travel, even in big groups. but I don't know what else to do. everything I can possibly set to possible lowest taxest setting, I have and the same problem.

[teratravp]

actually there is one last thing I could try but its a pain in the ass... trying a different vid driver version. anyone vouch for the latest 4.3's? cause that's what I'm using. If anyone can attest to these being a problem then I'll try a different one...

[Phaelon]

To completely see the stuttering go away, you need a 2.0 GHz processor and 1.5 gig of ram.

If you get 1 gig, you should see very little stuttering after that.

[GreyFox]

Have you tried playing in a window?

In some games that can be worse, but I find it to be better on my computer.

[teratravp]

hmmm... well I noticed that things get to some degree better the longer I'm in an area... this makes towers playable... and bases sort of playable (I still have to expect big pause jags here especially when opening doors) I know this game used to be alot better though as far as performance... I wish they saved versions of the rendering code and let you try different ones cause I've often heard one version is great for some people terrible for others...

[GreyFox]

yeah, the game is always laggy for me the first time I get to a continent etc, but when it normalize I can play pretty well. Except for some lag in some situations.

I got a 1.6ghz, 512 Mb Ram, and a Geforce 4 GO 64 mb. And everything on low, or off, and in a 800x600 window.

So if I never open the outfit pane, I can get pretty stable fps

[Madcow]

Here was my experience in the game, and what the different upgrades did for me:

Started on a Pentium 4 2.4, 512 meg of 2100 DDR Ram with some crappy Nvidia card that came with the computer on a dial-up connection. I was able to play in smaller battles, once I came across the zerg the system seemed to forget I existed and I could wander seemingly immune to damage for minutes at a time. It was moments of great fun with times of uselessness.

Eventually it became all but unplayable from some different patches. I got cable internet. This literally did nothing but bring me to the point where the game seemed to run as smooth as it did on a dialup connection the week of release.

I purchased a 9600xt video card. The first 5 minutes of any gaming session were all but unplayable as different textures were loading, if I stayed on the same cont beyond 5 minutes it was fairly smooth with regular stuttering. The cont load screens took forever and I often had a CTD before the continent fully loaded. I tried every one of these optimization ideas and nothing would improve the issues I had. Lag at every door opening, fps bottoming out in zergs.

I upgraded to 1 GB of PC2100 DDR RAM. The game is a dream. I'm at medium graphic settings and getting a pretty consistent 40 fps even in zerg situations. The minimum computer requirements they state you need for the game are a complete joke at this point. In order for the game to run remotely smooth, you do need 1 GB of RAM. Upgrading my video card was a vast improvement for me, but even then it wasn't completely ideal. It wasn't until I shelled out for new RAM that the game truly turned into the game it was supposed to be. It sucks to upgrade your computer for a game, but if you really want to play this I'd say you have to.

On a side note, when I previously lagged it would always show my ping in the high triple digits. I was always concerned about my internet connection causing me issues, but since I installed the RAM it is consistently ~40 ms at Markov and ~70 ms on Emerald. The ping seems to be directly correlated to how your computer can handle all the information, not your actual internet connection.

[teratravp]

Figured it out.

You have to set the first three items in engine3d_perf.ini to false. Now I get no lag, no stutter, no HDD access. It's a very night and day difference and I knew some setting was whacked before, not hardware.

[delta]

Written by 006007:

Okay, here are a couple of tips to increase your FPS.

PART I:

If you run nVidia drivers here's what you can do to boost framerates, but at the cost of visual quality.

First, just go to your desktop and right click. A menu will pop up, click properties. Go to the settings tab and click advanced. Another menu will pop up and there should be a tab with the name of your video card on it. Click to that tab. From there, go to the side panel that pops up and go to Performance & Quality settings.

Note: For these next tweaks, some of the options may not exist, this is true for older cards, most newer cards should have these options. If not, it's no big deal.

First, while still and P & Q set your image settings to high performance and uncheck the application controlled boxes on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Set both to off. Next go to Direct 3D settings and set the mipmap detail level to Best Performance. After that go to OpenGL settings and set vertical sync to Always Off. Apply and you're done!

You should notice a drop in detail levels, but a noticeable jump in framerates.

PART II:

This part is a little more tricky, and harder for me to explain, but i'll do my best.

When you first turn on your computer, go to your BIOS. It's usually hitting the delete key, or F10 on some systems. Some computers tell you what the settings key is when you boot up as well.

Okay, so go in here and, sorry for the forthcoming generalization, but snoop around for an option labeled 'Aperature size'. There should be options like 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256. Find the value that is twice the amount of your video card's memory size, or the same size if the double is not available. Set this option and save to CMOS.

Also try to find an option to make the Video BIOS cacheable, enable that. It should help for most newer cards.

There, now you should be optimized for better video performance.

[Mag-Mower]

Teratravp, what were your frames per second befor you switched the 3 settings? what is the Frame rate now? is there a great increase in performance? i downloaded the trial and i had 10-20 FPS, just looking for ways to improve the speed... and what were the options you switched?

[Rbstr]

the graphix apeture being 2x you vidcards memory is false delta, THG tested it a while back

[Mag-Mower]

UHH, i would like a response to my question... please?

[Rbstr]

I would go ahead and just test it to find out yourself, you can always change it back if it doesn't.

Its the first 3 entries in the thing thier up on the top